Put On Your Thinking Cap

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things! And powerful things at that, when mixed with definiteness of purpose, and burning desire, can be translated into riches – Napoleon Hill


The era we live in is a “See all; tell all” one. People are quick to speak and slow to think. We are constantly encouraged to speak our mind. The media encourages free speech to the degree that inaccurate reporting is a non-issue, they simply create other fanciful stories to elaborate how wrong they were. We are mostly impressed when our children finally learn to speak that we forget we ought to teach them how to think.

Thinking is such a powerful tool. One can go on and argue that thinking is in fact more important than speaking. Whatever it is that we say cannot be more powerful than the thought behind it. Does this not imply that we ought to invest heavily in our thinking systems? What we think ultimately dictates what we say and what we do. If our thoughts amount to nothing, it means our subsequent speech and actions will be meaningless.

How do we fine tune our thinking processes? We do this by looking closely at what we feed our minds. If we spend a large chunk of our time reading and watching shows that have no value, we feed our minds as such. We have all heard the popular saying “As a man thinks, so he is”. We cannot amount to more than we ponder upon. To put one’s thinking cap on means that we think, evaluate and review the details before we make an ultimate decision. There is nothing wrong with the phrases “I don’t know” or “I’ll get back to you”. Once we understand how powerful our words are, we really assimilate the importance of thinking before speaking.

When we are truly in a period of awakening, it is a time when we think more and speak less. It is when we realise that what we have been doing has not been working for us and that it’s time to return to the drawing board; time to put on our thinking caps.